Over the last few years, I’ve written several columns on the subject of 4K, and the message in the consumer marketplace remains unchanged: the big television manufacturers need shiny new toys to sell, and 4K gets the nod. Granted, the pictures are stunning, the resolution is remarkable, the price point is way higher than HD, and 4K content is very scarce.
For the Rental & Staging market, however, there’s a shining light on the horizon for the emerging 4K presentation industry. At InfoComm 2014, something caught my eye that made perfect sense in the 4K domain. Forget the broadcasters and video-on-demand streamers — this is a closed-circuit application all the way. For those high-end business leaders seeking to produce an event in 4K, a solution is at hand. I’m not offering this discussion as a product promo, but rather, as a keen observer seeing a very logical step in the evolution of presentation switching.
The Early Days
To take us back to the early days of presentation switching (from a hardware and workflow standpoint), I spoke at length with Erik Iversen, Barco’s product manager for image processing. Prior to Barco, Erik’s career evolved from projection to systems engineering to live switching. First hand, he’s witnessed the industry’s change from the “punch and pray” method of switching to the first Folsom Research products that allowed seamless dissolves between computer sources.
“In the early days, we had to create files for every projector, for every source,” said Iversen. “If I had a four screen show, positioned left and right with left and right repeaters, I had to create files in four projectors for every single source on screen. That included I-Mag, demo computers, PowerPoint, and much more. So, in a typical Silicon Valley tech show with 20 to 30 computers, three or four cameras and multiple playbacks — the workload was intense.”
“Imagine in your presentation, you’re looking at PowerPoint, and the presenter wants to switch to a demo — on four different screens,” continued Iversen. “The AV tech gets the call from the stage manager to switch to the demo. Because there was no software control back then, buttons would be pressed manually on the matrix switcher, the projectors would get a command to mute their output, and commands would be sent to the projectors to load the file. We’d then send the video, the projectors would lock, and the presenter could now talk to the video. The round trip, from button press to video on screen, was somewhere between three and five seconds of black — essentially, an eternity of black on screen.”
A Seamless, Blended Environment
Thankfully, modern day presentation switching has replaced that with a completely seamless workflow. The early Folsom products such as the 2200 series evolved into the ScreenPro™ series — in which the term “seamless” took on new meaning. The file setup architecture moved from the projectors into the presentation switchers themselves, enabling the projectors to be set up with one file, and one sync. In this manner, the projectors never lost sync during an event. Operators could cut and dissolve between sources with different resolutions and spend more time maximizing the show’s aesthetics.
“In the presentation switcher, Folsom also pioneered the notion of a source bus called ‘Preview,’ which is similar to the Preview bus in broadcast production switchers,” explained Iversen. “You could load Preview with a source that you wanted to see — before you actually presented it to the audience on Program. This true hardware preview took presentation switching to a new level.”
Coincident with the advance in single screen presentations, was the evolution in blending. “We went from a single screen XGA environment to the ability to blend multiple high resolution projectors,” said Iversen. “We jumped from single 4×3 screens to the ability to blend two or more XGA projectors into one large, seamless widescreen image. Now, instead of 1024 by 768, we could project 3000 by 768, taking us into the next generation of high resolution.”
“Where Do We Go Next?”
As new formats emerged and HD became prevalent, the ScreenPro evolved into Barco’s Encore™ system, with its ability to blend up to 32 screens. Yet, that product was introduced years ago (circa 2004) and, as we know, the industry hasn’t stood still in terms of emerging formats, higher resolutions, and an educated customer base with a desire for more complex (and more entertaining) rental and staging events. From the manufacturer’s standpoint, one has to ask, “Where do we go next?”
“We saw the trend where high-end movie theaters were moving up to a higher resolution,” noted Iversen. “Until then, they had essentially been projecting HD images, and cropping down for the 2:35 resolution. But with the advent of 4K digital cinema, the projectors put more pixels on screen, for a much higher resolution image. In addition, we started getting calls from Silicon Valley companies, saying ‘Hey, we have this new 4K device! How do we show it?’ This in turn drove many of our new product plans — because we figured out how to scale 4K and bring it to the events market. It’s called E2.”
Displaying the 4K Desktop
Numerous Silicon Valley companies such as NVIDIA and AMD manufacture ultra-high-end graphics cards capable of creating true 4K desktops and running remarkable 4K apps. These little PC dynamos are used for high-end simulation, visualization, GIS (Graphical Information Systems), video editing and graphics — not to mention the emerging 4K gaming industry. When one of these companies elects to do an event or a product introduction, their goal is a presentation in native 4K — because HD simply won’t do.
“At InfoComm, we showed a projector blend of 4K, using E2 and the Barco HDQ-4K35 projectors,” said Iversen,” and for companies like NVIDIA, companies that sell that type of high-end hardware, we now have the ideal presentation system that can handle native 4K.”
A Little 4K Caveat
There’s a caveat with 4K presentations, and companies desiring to move in that direction need to have their eyes wide open. The workflow, from concept to presentation, is the same, but the budget for a 4K event would essentially be four times that of an HD event — because you’re dealing with signals that are four times HD. The storage medium needs to be four times as large. The rendering of your graphics and videos will take an enormously longer time, and the file size of a 4K video is exponentially larger than that of an HD video. Your graphics department might consider investing in a dedicated, high-powered “render farm,” — just to get the graphics and videos complete in time for the event. Don’t let these facts discourage you, because the end result will certainly be the finest, most spectacular way to put your event on screen, in native 4K.
Be Ready
From my perspective, 4K is the next evolution in presentation switching. One company is at the forefront, others will surely follow, but just like HD, the acceptance and implementation will be slow and steady.
“Quite frankly, 4K is coming,” concluded Iversen, “and make sure you’re ready for it in a professional manner. As an AV professional, you need to be able to handle whatever comes at you in a show environment, including all the flavors of 4K. That’s the biggest message —4K is coming; it will get there, and you need to be ready for it.”
